AN F1 CAR CAN BRAKE FROM 300 KM/ TO ZERO IN UNDER 4 SECONDS - HERE'S HOW.
I know a lot of people in the fast car game, like A LOT. Over the years many of them have built up some properly fast and powerful cars, and more than a handful of these chaps have left the braking systems standard. Sure, on some cars, it’s ok because they’re over-braked having decently-sized calipers and discs that exceed the power on tap, but I’m talking about stock systems on cars that have had monster motor swaps. Years back, one chap had a Mk1 Golf, you know the one, the first legendary hatchback from VW that tips the scales at under 900 kg. Well, it was running on a turbocharged 2.0 16-valve ABF lump with over 350 kW (475 kW plus) to the wheels, and the stock brakes were still employed to reign the car in from speeds it was never meant to get up to in the first place. I went in the car a few times because when you’re in your 20s, there’s not as much fear as there should be. The brakes were unvented 239 mm discs with basic single-pot calipers up front with 178 mm drums at the rear. They managed to do the job, but it was proper hairy at times. The point is that many people go this way, braking is one of the last things to be upgraded. The thing is, a decent set of brakes can make a car capable on a track day, and even be able to put in quicker laps than a car with a decent amount more power. If you can brake where you need to and get back on the power in a smooth motion, you can do better than a faster car that gets unsettled scrubbing off speed - to a degree. A bigger car with blogger brakes and more power should be quicker, driver-dependent. So the other day we did a full rundown of braking systems from when they started out as a block of wood and a lever right up to the modern components and materials that are used today. It used to be that the best braking systems available, carbon-ceramics, were only seen on supercars and racecars, but these days they’re available on high-end performance cars as an option or easily sourced from an aftermarket supplier. But what is the best current braking system you can get? Well, while the systems don’t quite look like a braking setup we’re familiar with, Formula One brakes are second to none.
In Formula One, the cars drive at a ridiculously fast pace for between an hour and a half and two hours, and the braking systems need to be able to not only slow the car down in the most rapid way that physics allows, but they also need to have reliability and longevity. It’s for this reason the braking system looks very different to that of a street car. This goes for the design, the size and the materials used. They need some pretty special stuff along with stellar engineering to be able to slow a Formula 1 car down from speeds as high as 375 km/h to a crawl in no time at all. Well, a little time, the current F1 braking systems can get one of these cars from 300 km/h to zero in as little as 3.79 seconds. That’s hard to believe, and yeah, a lot of that also comes down to the compound of the tyres used and the surface of the racetrack. The soft compounds will do better than the harder ones, that’s physics for you. F1 cars shave off speed so rapidly that they can register just below 6Gs of force, which will squish your innards and make you pass out if you’re not used to it, never mind the snapped neck as a side effect. To put that into perspective, a space shuttle on launch only pulls around 3Gs. The repeated and rapid use of the brakes means they get hot fast, like over 1,000 degrees Celcius hot, and so the materials need to not only withstand insane heat, but they need to be able to rapidly cool too without cracking or losing effectiveness. We’ve always taken an interest in the systems and how they look and work, but you don’t get to see too much of this during an F1 race because everyone is doing F1 race things, but luckily for us (and you) Scott Mansellm from Driver61 headed through to the Alpine F1 team to check out their braking systems in details so the rest of us can learn a thing or two, or three. This is an interesting one….
Take a look at the YouTube video from Driver61 that explains everything you need to know about Formula 1 braking systems and why they're so damn good: How Formula 1 Brakes Work (F1 team explains) | Driver61
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